Photo: pingu1963
As if mornings weren’t already busy enough, what with getting four kids ready for school, and me out the door to work, we arrived this morning at “World Book Day“. I’m sure it was thought up by someone who not only hasn’t any children of their own but who hadn’t even an inkling how much stress they were burdening unwitting parents with. For on this day children are encouraged to go to school dressed as their favourite character from a book. They’re also encouraged to bring a book they’ve enjoyed reading to swap with their school mates to encourage them to read even more, but I won’t be dwelling on that virtuous side of events!
(Thankfully in all this, DS1 is now at senior school so is officially “too old to do all that stuff”. Anyway, on with the story.)
So to this morning. I haven’t slept particularly well the past few nights but last night I managed to get to bed at a reasonable hour and got a decent nights sleep in. The payback for this however, is that I wake up slightly groggy and find myself needing to iron tops for 3 of us while the little ones run around finding their costumes. DD was going as Snow White; DS3 had half of his Captain Hook outfit on and was trying to persuade me to let him have a real hook hand. DS2 had come up with his own plan – he wanted to go as Greg, the character from the ‘Diary of a Wimpy Kid’ books.
If you’ve never seen the ‘Diary of a Wimpy Kid‘ books all you really need to know is that the illustrations are black and white cartoons. The ‘Wimpy Kid’ costume therefore promised to be relatively simple being made up of a white t-shirt, a black pair of shorts (or in our case trousers since it’s still freezing in the UK!) and a pair of white trainers. The pièce de résistance would be that we’d paint DS2’s face white and add a black outline to make him actually look like the cartoon character.
As usual everything in our house is left to the last minute and my wife asked if I would do DS2’s facepaint. At the time she asked me I should have been walking out the door to start my commute but instead I’m hunting out a sponge with which to “white him up”. Thankfully it only took a few minutes to get this done and we quickly added the black outline after my wife had added a curly moustache to DS3’s Captain Hook ensemble.
Face painted we decided to quickly add “Greg’s” black nose. First mistake. Drawing a black ‘C’ around DS2’s nose made it look like he had a badly drawn moustache. He didn’t like it. Lip started to quiver. Tears began welling. Okay, we decided to take it off. Grabbed some tissue, wiped off the offending line and re-sponged over it with white again – there, all fixed.
Out to the front door, look in the mirror. More lip quivering, tears actually rolling this time. “I’m too embarrassed to go to school like this.”
Ugh.
My wife tells DS2 to run upstairs and start wiping off all the face paint. Despite desperately needing to leave I follow him up and help him clean it all off. He ends up going to school with a vaguely white tinge which I’m sure will come off in the shower. Maybe after a few showers.
I had to run at that point. I’m pretty sure they made it to school before 9am. I’m very sure they had a fun day. I’m absolutely certain I didn’t get to the office on time so had to work late… again.
So thank you “World Book Day”. See you again next year.